The invention relates to methods for estimating a sentiment for an entity and systems for performing such methods.
Sentiments or emotions may be expressed in terms of text documents, such as newspaper articles, speeches, blog entries or contributions in the internet. For example, due to the increasing adoption of Web 2.0 technologies the influence and amount of such information distributed through the internet may grow. As a consequence more and more information is published by organizations, analysts, news agencies and individuals.
On the one hand the contemporary information flow constitutes a thread and on the other hand an opportunity for marketing, communication or customer relation ship departments of businesses. However, due to the huge amount of information, for example internet published web documents, the extraction of a sentiment or tracking of opinions towards a particular entity, as for example a large corporation, is virtually unfeasible using conventional methods. However, it is sometimes desirable to obtain an overall opinion or sentiment that is maintained in one ore more text documents. Conventionally, a detailed manual examination of those documents is necessary.